This week's butterfly, Atrophaneura or Pachliopta or Papilio kotzebuea, lives in the Philippine Islands, where it is familiar to enough English-speaking people that it has an accepted English nickname: the Pink Rose.
There is just one small problem with this name...
As this Photo by Greg Hume (Greg5030) - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10866401, shows, the animal is not pink. There are no truly pink butterflies, though some pale-colored ones, like the Aurora, can show a pale iridescent pink in some lights, and some red or red-spotted ones can fade to dull pinkish shades of brown, orange, or violet. Living Pink Rose Swallowtails show patches of bright pinkish red. Some individuals show more pink than others, especially on the underside, as in this photo By D. Gordon E. Robertson - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11076261...
...but their main color is black. But the name "Black Rose Swallowtail" is taken. It's like the name situation of Europe's and America's Black Swallowtails. In Europe the Black Swallowtail really is blacker than its white and yellow biological relatives, but it's more yellow than black. In the United States the Black Swallowtail shows more yellow than a half-dozen other Swallowtails. So some people have preferred to call our Black Swallowtail the "Royal Swallowtail," and some prefer to call the Pink Rose the "Velvet Rose."
Well, at least they agree that the butterflies are pretty.
Pachliopta or Atrophaneura or, if you want to be really oldfashioned, Papilio kotzebuea lives on vines in the genus Aristolochia and has been regarded as a sub-species of P. aristolochiae. It is currently classified as a separate species with six sub-species of its own. Though it looks dramatic enough to me, it has not received as much attention as some of the other Atrophaneuras. It does not seem to be immediately endangered. It's not the biggest, most dramatic-looking, rarest, commonest, smallest, most popular, most unpopular...it's just another member of a family of large eye-catching butterflies. It's not even all that large, wings typically spanning about three inches.
The male, especially, can look very sombre, like this one photographed by Jill Kula for biolib.cz.
Museum specimens, which this web site shows only if we can't find any pictures of living butterflies, can fade to a shade of pinkish brown.
It is easily photographed; hundreds of images of this species are scattered around the Internet, with the commercial photo site Alamy.com alone boasting 73.
One of the later species in this group to receive a species name of its own (in 1821), kotzebuea was named for a living explorer, Captain Otto von Kotzebue. In the United States he is better remembered for his visit to Alaska, where a place and a dog breed are named after him. He was Russian, although he described the butterfly in a book published in German:
In the Captain's memory a Russian site that opens in English, Butterfliarium.ru, has offered cage-reared specimens of P. kotzebuea as live pets. Meh. In the Philippines these butterfies are believed to fly for up to two weeks; in Russia caged specimens can be expected to live for five days.
This web page has captured a time-lapse sequence of the butterfly emerging from its chrysalis:
The chrysalis has the same odd, presumably bird-repelling, dead-leaf look that many other Atrophaneuras have, and apparently the egg and caterpillar look similar to others in this genus too. I found no information about them.
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